During Sunday’s World Series game, Joe Posnanski asked fans on Twitter “if you could have any two living people (broadcasting) tonight’s baseball game, who would you choose?” He soon noted that he received “526 responses in two minutes, the vast majority of them being some variation on ‘Vin Scully and Nobody.’ ” Posnanski elaborated in this column:
… No second person. Just Vin. Brandon McCarthy chose Vin and someone to bring him water. Several chose Vin and Teller from Penn and Teller. And so on. I could not agree more. What I think makes Vin such a wonderful listen — and has for more than a half century — is that his voice stays in the background, the statistics he uses make sense and feel true, his stories enhance what you’re watching, he’s honest about whatever he’s seeing and he has Coltrane’s sense of rhythm. It’s a remarkable combination. Baseball is a tough game to announce. The action is spread out. The pace is uneven. The strategies are often intricate and not especially interesting for casual fans (they don’t call boring politics “inside baseball” for nothing). The statistics are often wonky. But there are great opportunities, too — baseball’s a wonderful game for stories, for drama, for insight. Yes, it would be great to hear Vin Scully call a World Series again. Well, hey, at least we got him to trend on Twitter for a while.
The conversation even managed to steal the spotlight from whether Game 4 national anthem singer Zooey Deschanel is an agent of good or evil.
In any case, I have to say again, as much as I would love Scully to do the World Series, I have seen no indication that he has any real desire to do one with the Dodgers not involved. Tony Jackson backed me up on this with a tweet: “Vinnie’s last WS was 1997 (on radio). He stopped doing them because he wanted to stop doing them.”
If Scully were to do a World Series, it would almost certainly be as part of a three-man booth with Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. I can’t see Fox being willing to open the can of worms of pushing its favorite baseball announcers aside. Roaming the country for the better part of two weeks, when he has actively sought to reduce his travel schedule to spend more time with his wife, just to be one of a trio, doesn’t sound like our friend Vin.
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